🚀 Thread: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Jalen Brunson Most People Don’t Know 1/ Jalen shoots left-handed on the court but does everything else right-handed — because his dad taped his right thumb as a kid to force the switch and build that dominant left hand! 🏀 2/ Grew up in NBA locker rooms watching his dad Rick (a journeyman guard who played for 8 teams in 9 seasons). The family motto “The magic is in the work” was taped on mirrors, doors, and the fridge. 💪 3/ As a kid, he played Pop Warner football coached by Vince Papale — the real-life inspiration for the movie Invincible! 🏈 4/ High school: His family moved multiple times before settling in Illinois. At Stevenson, he dropped 57 points in double OT, led the team to the state title (30 in the championship game), and was named Illinois Mr. Basketball and McDonald’s All-American. 🏆 5/ At Villanova, he was a role player on the 2016 NCAA champs… then became National Player of the Year and led them to another title in 2018. He graduated in just 3 years with a communications degree. His #1 jersey is retired. 🎓 6/ Drafted 33rd overall (2nd round) by the Mavericks in 2018. Many teams passed on him — he responded by leading Dallas to the Western Conference Finals in 2022. 🏀 7/ A die-hard Justin Bieber superfan. No matter what playlist he’s on, the last song before every game has to be Bieber. 🎤 8/ Married his high school sweetheart Ali Marks in 2023 (proposed in their high school gym). They welcomed their first child, daughter Jordyn, in 2024. ❤️ 9/ Set an NBA record with 8 three-pointers in a half without missing — and tied the record with 9 in a full game without a miss. The ultimate clutch gene. 🔥 10/ Signed with the Knicks in 2022 on a four-year deal, became team captain, earned multiple All-Star and All-NBA honors, and turned into the heart and soul of New York basketball — from overlooked second-rounder to franchise icon. 🗽 From a kid bouncing between NBA locker rooms and high schools to becoming the captain and leader of the New York Knicks — Jalen Brunson is built different. #JalenBrunson #Knicks #NBA #Underdog

🚀 Thread: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Sundar Pichai Most People DON’T Know 1/ Sundar Pichai has an extraordinary memory — he can recall every phone number he’s ever dialed since childhood. Tech-obsessed from a young age! 📞 2/ Grew up in a modest middle-class home in Chennai (then Madras) without a car, TV, or even a telephone for years. He and his brother slept in the living room. Classic humble beginnings. 🏠 3/ He was captain of his high school cricket team and once dreamed of becoming a professional cricketer. 🏏 4/ Studied Metallurgical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur (earned a silver medal), not computer science! Then got an MS in Materials Science from Stanford and an MBA from Wharton. Brains hustle. 🎓 5/ Joined Google on April 1, 2004 — April Fool’s Day — the exact same day Gmail launched. He initially thought the Gmail announcement was a prank! 😂 6/ He personally pitched and championed the idea for Google Chrome. It was initially rejected over high costs, but he did deep research and convinced leadership. Chrome now powers nearly half the internet. 🌐 7/ Before Google, he worked as a product manager/engineer at Applied Materials (semiconductors) and as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Real-world grit. 💼 8/ In 2014, he was a serious contender for Microsoft’s CEO role (alongside Satya Nadella). Google gave him big retention packages to stay — loyalty paid off. 💪 9/ Married his IIT Kharagpur college sweetheart Anjali (they met in their first year; she’s a chemical engineer). They have two kids and keep a low-key family life. ❤️ 10/ As CEO of Google (since 2015) and Alphabet (since 2019), he’s steered the company through Android dominance, Chrome’s rise, and now the AI era with Gemini. One of the highest-paid tech CEOs ever — all while staying remarkably grounded. 🌍 From a boy in Tamil Nadu who waited years for a rotary phone to leading one of the world’s most powerful tech companies into the future — Sundar Pichai is built different. #SundarPichai #Google #Alphabet #MindBlown #TechLeadership

Haha this is awesome. Elon agreed to the "greenshoe" IPO option but only if the bankers and team all wore actual green shoes 😂🔥 (A "greenshoe" is a standard IPO provision that allows underwriters to sell up to ~15% more shares than originally planned if demand is strong, helping stabilize the stock price in early trading.)

$SPCX: $18 billion revenue, -$10 billion net income, valued at $2.2 trillion $META: $215 billion revenue, $70 billion net income, valued at $1.45 trillion But yeah it all makes sense..

Legendary VC Chris Sacca said Cyan Banister is "maybe the most successful angel investor ever." After today, I don't think there's a question: SpaceX was her very first investment ever... in 2008. The company was valued ~$400 million. Today, it's over $2 trillion.

🚀 Thread: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Elon Musk Most People DON’T Know 1/ Elon taught himself to code at age 10 from a manual and sold his video game Blastar for $500 (~$1,600 today). A 12-year-old legend! 🎮 2/ He dropped out of a Stanford PhD in applied physics after just 2 days to chase the internet boom and build Zip2. Balls of steel. 3/ Triple citizen: Born in South Africa, Canadian at 17 (thanks to mom Maye), US citizen in 2002. Global from day one. 🌍 4/ Paid for college by throwing massive parties at his frat house (mom even collected tickets sometimes). Left with student debt too! 💰 5/ Owns James Bond’s submarine car — the Lotus Esprit “Wet Nellie” from The Spy Who Loved Me. Bought it for ~$1M to actually make it submerge. 🏎️🌊 6/ Inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. RDJ studied Elon’s mannerisms for Iron Man. Musk even cameo’d in Iron Man 2. 🦸‍♂️ 7/ Slept on the office couch and showered at the YMCA during early Zip2 days. Pure grind. 8/ Launched his own fragrance called “Burnt Hair” through The Boring Company. Yes, it smells like burnt hair. 😂 9/ Came this close to selling Tesla to Google for $6B in 2013 during rough times. Glad he didn’t. 10/ Sister Tosca runs Passionflix (romance & erotica adaptations). Family full of creators. His sci-fi obsession (Foundation, Hitchhiker’s Guide) shaped everything. 📚 From bullied kid in Pretoria to leading the future with Tesla, SpaceX, xAI & more — the man is built different. #ElonMusk #MindBlown #Tesla #SpaceX

SpaceX IPOs today. One hallmark of the largest IPO in history : Elon Musk's astoundingly low cost of capital. Despite raising 25x more than the typical founder, Musk retained ownership in the top decile. 🧵

Your margin is my opportunity: AI version… The biggest surprise of 2026 is that the capability gap between the best open-weight/source models and the best closed models has narrowed much faster than the pricing gap. The pricing gap remains enormous while the capability gap is quite narrow. What does this means in practice? For a company consuming 1 billion input tokens and 1 billion output tokens per month: GPT-5.5 Pro: ~$105,000 Claude Opus 4.8: ~$30,000 DeepSeek V4 Pro: ~$5,220 DeepSeek R1: ~$2,740 I asked ChatGPT what it thought about this and it answered as follows: “If I were building a company today, the economic frontier would look roughly like: DeepSeek V4 Pro / R1 for high-volume inference. Claude Opus for premium agent workflows where reliability matters. GPT-5.5 Pro only for workloads where its incremental capability demonstrably produces enough business value to justify a 20–40× token premium.” Most CEOs have no idea that, instead of this nuanced approach, their teams are running amok internally by picking the most expensive models in most cases and burning through massive budgets with zero governance, audit ability and control. As control planes like our Software Factory become more standard, you can expect the run rate revenue growth of the frontier labs to go down meaningfully and the revenues of the open models to skyrocket. Why? Because we can implement the nuanced approach above and be agnostic to model - instead focusing on customer intent, model task and cost management among other things.

Two of our worst VC stories: 1. A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company. Seriously. 🙄 2. I got introduced to @pmarca. Meeting got scheduled for a Monday, which should have been a clue. I thought it was just a casual meeting. He thought it was a pitch and brought the whole @a16z partnership team. Hilarity ensued. 🤪 At one point one of them said: “You don’t seem very prepared.” Which was true because I wasn’t. I framed the rejection letter they sent.

The thing nobody tells you about exponential change is that it feels like nothing is happening right up until the moment everything happens at once.

Longevity researchers spent the last 6 months obsessed with the lifestyle of the Sardinian Blue Zone. Most people think it’s the wine or the walking. They’re wrong. It’s the Entomophagy (insect consumption). The "secret" to living to 100 isn't more supplements. It’s eating bugs. Here is the breakdown of why Crickets are the ultimate longevity hack: 1. The Protein Density Problem Beef is 20% protein. Crickets are 65%. But it’s not just the amount—it’s the bioavailability. Your gut absorbs insect protein 2x faster than whey. No bloating, just pure cellular repair. 2. The Chitin Factor Exoskeletons contain Chitin, a prebiotic fiber you can’t get from plants. Studies show Chitin drastically reduces systemic inflammation—the "silent killer" behind aging. It’s like a scrub brush for your arteries. 3. Vitamin B12 Overload Crickets have 3x more B12 than salmon. B12 is the primary driver of DNA synthesis. If you want to stop your telomeres from shrinking, you need high-octane B12. 4. The Hormetic Stressor Eating "novel" proteins triggers a mild hormetic response. It signals to your body that resources are scarce/different, activating the SIRT1 longevity gene. The Routine: Replace morning eggs with 20g of roasted cricket powder. * Brain fog: Gone. * HRV: Up 15%. * Energy: Stable all day. The West is allergic to the idea because of "the ick factor." But the data is clear: If you want to reach 100, you need to stop eating like a 20th-century human and start eating like a 10,000-year-old one. Eat the bugs. Live forever. 🦗

Benchmark just led a $15M seed for Eigen—and they’re not building another "chatbot." While everyone else is busy trying to replace your friends with AI, Eigen is building the "Mutual Friend." The goal? A new category of AI focused on human connection, not just productivity. Here is why this is a massive signal for Product Leaders: 1. The "Anti-Isolation" Play Most AI agents are solo experiences. You GPT. Eigen is betting that the real value of AI is in the *middle*—helping humans navigate relationships and collaborate better. 2. Distribution via Trust By positioning as a "mutual friend," they are solving the hardest part of social products: the Cold Start Problem. If the AI can facilitate the intro, the friction to connect drops to zero. 3. The Pedigree Founder Paul Scherer has an unconventional path (self-taught, moved to SF to build). When Benchmark drops $15M on a seed for a "human-first" AI platform, pay attention. The next wave of AI isn't about better prompts. It's about better relationships.

Cancer isn’t some random villain sabotaging our shot at radical longevity. It’s the predictable tax biology levies when you push human lifespan into uncharted territory. The longer cells divide, the more mutations accumulate. Senescent cells pile up like unpaid bills, leaking inflammatory signals that create the perfect breeding ground for tumors. Aging doesn’t just correlate with cancer — it enables it. But 2026 just rewrote the script. American Cancer Society data dropped: overall five-year survival for all cancers hit 70% — up from 49% in the 1970s. Metastatic melanoma? Survival jumped from ~16% to 35% in 25 years, thanks to immune checkpoint inhibitors. Stage-4 disease that once meant months now often becomes a manageable chronic condition. Immunotherapy isn’t just extending life — it’s turning the immune system into a precision-guided missile against tumors that used to hide in plain sight. CAR-T and next-gen cell therapies are moving outpatient. Armored T-cells engineered with their own cytokines are persisting in hostile tumor microenvironments. Personalized mRNA vaccines (the same tech that crushed COVID) are now targeting neoantigens in real patients, shrinking tumors in weeks for a fraction of traditional costs in early compassionate cases. Here’s where it gets existential for longevity: the companies cracking senescent cell clearance (senolytics) aren’t just fighting aging wrinkles. They’re building immune firewalls. Clear the zombie cells that fuel chronic inflammation and you don’t just slow aging — you starve the soil where cancer grows. Combine that with smarter immunotherapy, and the vicious cycle breaks. We’re not talking supplements or biohacks. We’re talking platforms that could let the first cohort treat 120 like the new 80. The data is here. The tech is converging. The only question left is who executes fastest. Game on. Who’s building it? 🚀

SBF didn’t lose $8 billion because the trades went bad. He lost it because the trades were never his to make. FTX sat on a $32 billion exchange with customer deposits treated like a personal venture fund. Alameda borrowed billions, bought illiquid stakes in Anthropic, Solana bags, Robinhood shares, even SpaceX exposure through side vehicles. On paper at the November 2022 peak it looked like genius: Anthropic mooned, Solana 15x’d, Bitcoin went from $16k to six figures. Pure investment selection was elite. The fatal mismatch wasn’t market risk. It was duration risk. A CoinDesk article drops the balance sheet. CZ tweets. $6 billion walks out the door in 72 hours. You can’t liquidate a 7.84% Anthropic position over a weekend. You can’t sell real estate or private equity when retail wants fiat yesterday. The exchange had the controls of a college dorm spreadsheet: no real segregation, no reserve proof that mattered, no hard asset-liability matching. Risk limits? Optional. Alameda’s borrowing from FTX? Unlimited until it wasn’t. That’s what a bank run exposes in 72 hours that years of bull market hide. The bankruptcy estate sold everything at the literal bottom. Anthropic at fire-sale prices that now look absurd. Solana in the teens. Total recovered so far: around $18 billion, with creditors getting 118-143% back in some cases because crypto recovered hard. Hold the portfolio to today and the math hits $136 billion. The difference isn’t fraud on the asset side. It’s the decision to commingle, lever, and treat customer money as dry powder for the next big bet. SBF’s defense keeps circling the same point: FTX was never truly insolvent, just illiquid in a panic. New witnesses, alleged pressure on co-founders, lawyers who billed $950 million pushing the Chapter 11 anyway. He’s filing pro se from prison, appealing, asking for a new trial while his parents lobby publicly. Prosecutors say no. Appeals court so far unmoved. 25 years stands. The pattern is the oldest one in finance: genius at picking direction, amateur at managing the pipe. You can be right on every asset and still blow up if your customers can redeem faster than you can exit. FTX proved crypto exchanges aren’t “different this time.” They’re just faster versions of every mismatched bank that ever existed. The filter is brutal and already running. By the time the next cycle peaks, the question won’t be “was SBF a visionary investor?” It will be “why did anyone ever think running a bank with no real bank controls was a good idea?” And the answer will be obvious in hindsight — the same way we once wondered why anyone trusted a spreadsheet with no audit when the music was playing.

This food tech startup didn’t build a better cow. It deleted the cow. Bloom Labs just hit $0.89 per liter for real dairy proteins — identical at the molecular level to what comes out of a Holstein, zero animals required. Traditional milk is still $3.40 at the store. Their bioreactors run on sugar water, CO₂, and electricity. The output tastes, foams, and bakes exactly like the real thing because it is the real thing — just printed by yeast instead of biology that needs 1,000 gallons of water per gallon of milk. Here’s the math that just broke the dairy industry: • One Bloom reactor the size of a shipping container produces 12,000 liters a day. • A single dairy cow produces ~25 liters a day and needs 200 square meters of land. • Bloom’s fully loaded cost (capex opex energy) is now below California almond milk. • They ship shelf-stable protein powder that rehydrates into milk in 17 seconds. No refrigeration until you open it. The pattern is identical to every platform extinction we’ve watched: 1980s: Lotus 1-2-3 owned spreadsheets until Microsoft made Excel free inside Office. 2007: Zynga built FarmVille on Facebook’s open platform until Facebook changed the rules and killed the golden goose. 2023: Twitterrific and Tweetbot spent a decade building the best client until Twitter cut the API on a random Thursday night. Now it’s 2026 and the $1 trillion global dairy supply chain is the next Lotus. The “cows on pasture” story was never about romance — it was a distribution moat. You needed land, feed, trucks, and cold chains because milk spoils in four days. Bloom’s powder lasts 18 months on a shelf. Their AI controls pH, temperature, and gene expression in real time so every batch is identical. No seasonal variation. No herd disease. No $800M bailout request when feed prices spike. Farmers in Wisconsin and New Zealand aren’t competing with “plant-based alternatives.” They’re competing with code that scales on compute instead of pasture. One reactor replaces 480 cows. Bloom already has 41 contracted and is building a 400-reactor campus outside Austin that will outproduce the entire state of Vermont. The filter is already running. By 2030 the question won’t be “organic or conventional.” It will be “did this come from biology or from software?” And the answer will be obvious in hindsight — the same way we once asked why anyone would pay for software when Lotus was free at the library.

🚀 The Grand Unification is HERE. Marc Andreessen just dropped the mic: “AI is the killer crypto app. AI agents are going to need money… and it’s already happening.” People are already handing their AI tools bank accounts and credit cards. But when agents need to act 24/7 — paying for APIs, hiring other agents, executing trades, settling instantly — traditional finance falls apart. Enter crypto: native digital money, stablecoins, programmable rails, on-chain settlement. This is the perfect product-market fit. AI agents crypto = the future economy running on autopilot. Who’s still sleeping on $AI x $CRYPTO? 🔥 #AICrypto #Agents #Crypto

Jared Isaacman dropped out of high school at 16 and started a company in his parents' basement with $10,000 his grandfather gave him. Tonight he's on the deck of a Navy ship, waiting to welcome four astronauts home from the moon. That basement company is now Shift4 Payments. It processes over $200 billion a year in credit card transactions, about a third of all restaurants, hotels, and casinos in the U.S. Went public in 2020. He ran it as CEO from age 16 until he stepped down to take over NASA last year. He also co-founded Draken International, which ran a fleet of over 100 retired fighter jets whose entire job was playing the enemy in combat training for U.S. Air Force and NATO pilots. He sold it to Blackstone for over $100 million. He has over 8,000 hours in the cockpit and can fly more than a dozen types of military jets. He personally owns a MiG-29, a Russian fighter that tops 1,500 mph, which he bought from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's the only one in private American hands. In 2009, he flew around the entire planet in a small Cessna jet in 61 hours and 51 minutes, a world record, to raise money for Make-A-Wish. In 2021, he paid for and commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian spaceflight. Four people with no astronaut training, three days orbiting Earth, $250 million raised for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Then in 2024, he went back up on Polaris Dawn and floated outside the spacecraft, held to it by a 12-foot cable, in the first spacewalk ever done by someone outside a government space agency. That same flight reached 870 miles above Earth, farther than any human had been since the last Apollo crew in 1972. He took over as NASA's 15th administrator in December 2025. In his first three months, he redirected $20 billion away from a planned space station around the moon and toward building a permanent base on the moon's surface. Right now he's aboard the USS John P. Murtha, about 50 miles off San Diego. The capsule carrying the Artemis II crew is going to hit the atmosphere tonight at around 25,000 mph. If the heat shield holds (it took damage on its last unmanned test), if the parachutes open, four astronauts splash down at 8:07 PM ET after a 694,000-mile trip around the moon. And the person waiting for them has been to space twice, walked outside a spacecraft, owns the only Russian fighter jet in private American hands, and started his first company as a teenager in his parents' basement. His call sign is "Rook."

The number that should terrify every Western automaker is 1,500 kW. BYD's Flash Charging pushes 1,500 kilowatts into a car battery. The fastest charger you can find in the US today maxes out at 350 kW. ChargePoint is bragging about rolling out 600 kW chargers sometime in 2026. BYD is already at 2.5x that. Deployed. 5,000 stations live. 20,000 planned by December. The car in this video, the Song Ultra, starts at $22,000. Five minutes of charging gets you 250 miles of range. The fastest-charging EV you can buy in America is the Lucid Gravity at 400 kW, and it starts at $80,000. So BYD is charging 4x faster at one-quarter the price. And Geely just beat them last week with a 4-minute charge. The Chinese automakers aren't competing with each other on range or styling anymore. They're in a charging speed war that Western companies haven't even entered. BMW's response was literally "pursuing quick charging forces other compromises." That's the "640K ought to be enough for anybody" of the EV era.

$1.2 billion. 32 months. Gummy bears. Chad Janis was a VC at Summit Partners. Board observer at Chubbies, Brooklinen, Dr. Squatch. He watched the entire DTC playbook from the investor seat for years, then ran it himself in fast-forward. The speed only makes sense when you see the unit economics. $80/month subscription. 80% daily usage rate. 3x LTV-to-CAC ratio. Profitable at month 14. Most AI startups burning $100M a year can't say that. Grüns was printing cash while scaling. $25 million in a single month by August 2025. $300M run rate by month 24. 6,300 retail doors. Every Target, every Walmart, every Sam's Club. Still majority DTC. The retail was gravy on a business that already worked. Unilever paid $1.2B and probably got a bargain. They bought Liquid I.V. five years ago and it became a billion-dollar brand by 2025. Olly Nutrition. SmartyPants. Nutrafol. They're assembling the wellness Infinity Gauntlet, and Grüns was the fastest-growing piece on the board. The real story is form factor arbitrage. AG1 built a $600M powder business. Janis looked at it and asked one question: what if people don't hate nutrition, they just hate drinking chalk at 7am? Eight gummy bears solved a compliance problem the entire supplement industry had ignored for decades. The product was the distribution. Fastest CPG exit in modern history. And he started the idea while drinking a greens powder he knew he'd quit within 30 days.